IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/ecoaac/5-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Best versus the Rest: The Global Productivity Slowdown, Divergence across Firms and the Role of Public Policy

Author

Listed:
  • Dan Andrews
  • Chiara Criscuolo
  • Peter N. Gal

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to bring the debate on the global productivity slowdown – which has largely been conducted from a macroeconomic perspective – to a more micro-level. We show that a particularly striking feature of the productivity slowdown is not so much a lower productivity growth at the global frontier, but rather rising labour productivity at the global frontier coupled with an increasing labour productivity divergence between the global frontier and laggard (non-frontier) firms. This productivity divergence remains after controlling for differences in capital deepening and mark-up behaviour, suggesting that divergence in measured multi-factor productivity (MFP) may in fact reflect technological divergence in a broad sense. This divergence could plausibly reflect the potential for structural changes in the global economy – namely digitalisation, globalisation and the rising importance of tacit knowledge – to fuel rapid productivity gains at the global frontier. Yet, aggregate MFP performance was significantly weaker in industries where MFP divergence was more pronounced, suggesting that the divergence observed is not solely driven by frontier firms pushing the boundary outward. We contend that increasing MFP divergence – and the global productivity slowdown more generally – could reflect a slowdown in the diffusion process. This could be a reflection of increasing costs for laggard firms of moving from an economy based on production to one based on ideas. But it could also be symptomatic of rising entry barriers and a decline in the contestability of markets. We find the rise in MFP divergence to be much more extreme in sectors where pro-competitive product market reforms were least extensive, suggesting that policy weaknesses may be stifling diffusion in OECD economies.

Suggested Citation

  • Dan Andrews & Chiara Criscuolo & Peter N. Gal, 2016. "The Best versus the Rest: The Global Productivity Slowdown, Divergence across Firms and the Role of Public Policy," OECD Productivity Working Papers 5, OECD Publishing.
  • Handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaac:5-en
    DOI: 10.1787/63629cc9-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/63629cc9-en
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/63629cc9-en?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    firm dynamics; knowledge diffusion; productivity; regulation; technological change;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O43 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Institutions and Growth
    • O57 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries
    • O30 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - General
    • O40 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General
    • M13 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - New Firms; Startups

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaac:5-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.